1931, dimmed eyes gave bliss
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: Conversations between Esme & Edward, set very shortly after Edward's return in 1931. In the very first few weeks. With references to 'his brute question, in that hour' and '1927, What is Grief to Esme Cullen'
1. Chapter 1

**Notes: **Set very shortly after Edward's return to Esme & Carlisle. In the very first few weeks. With references to 'his brute question, in that hour' and '1927, What is Grief to Esme Cullen?' Title from 'At the Closed Gate of Justice' by James D. Corrothers .

* * *

_**1931; Philadelphia**_

"Are you going to say it, or not?"

Her voice, the sudden statement of thoughts, actually surprises Edward. He sat up straighter. "Excuse me?"

"You've been watching me for the last thirty minutes. I know you aren't obsessed with the laundry, so I assume-" Esme looked over to catch the tight grimace on the boy's face, just as he looked away. "Now you're really going to have to tell me."

Or not, so says the silence that has him not looking back at him, and holding himself more still. Esme turned back to folding the clothes, humming softly. And he can see it. She can wait. She doesn't even mind it. She's dealt with longer and deeper silences than his few minutes can compel her to concern. Though she is curious.

When did she become so certain of herself, of time and her place?

It's so much more her house than it is either of theirs.

"I was wondering when you were going to talk to me."

Esme made a face at the green sweater she was folding, tossing him a look. "Aren't I talking to you already?"

"Yes." Pause.

"I meant about-" He didn't go on. It just hung there on the air.

The folded green was placed on the stack and she turned toward him again. "You want to know when I'm going yell at you, you mean?"

Edward said nothing, studying her with red eyes, so very still. Reminding her too easily of someone both ready to take a house being dropped on them and still was ready to run at the drop of hat, at even the smallest whispered thought of being unwelcome in this place. She sat on the arm of the chair that held the clothing she was folding.

"You want me to take out my last five years on you? You want me to tell you that you took my friend and my husband and my life away when the door closed?" Esme laced her fingers together, setting them on her knee. "Do you think you are the only person in the world, or even this house, who found themselves in a situation that was less than perfect and decided running away made it better?"

Even with the ability to see her making the allusion to all three of them, Edward sat staring at her, still, and Esme shook her head.

"This is your home, Edward, and from the sound of it-" From the sound of his discussions with Carlisle, and his music, the twice it had started in the afternoon hours a day or two ago. "-you're already doing a good enough job of beating yourself up on a nearly unending basis. You know what you did. For all of whatever happened where you were, and - and you already see more of it than either of us ever wanted you to, correct? You don't need that from me, too."

"I don't deserve that. You're-" He couldn't even make the words form.

She watched it shudder across his youthful features, and those red eyes, that seemed so much older. Haunted. Eyes that carried the dead, struggling looked Carlisle's had lost when they'd brought him in again. Eyes that strained as though to find something else in her, something to damn himself on, that caught all her flawed reactions and her decision to stick with this still.

"Family isn't about deserving."

"I just want."

"What _do _you want, Edward?"

"To do something, to," but the words are too small, the past so big.

Esme smiled, faintly, moving to pull another piece out of the clean basket again, "You could help me with folding all of this."

"I don't know that I'm that apropos," Edward said with a crease that was both grimace and smirk. The amusement flitting across in how his cheeks lifted even when his lips didn't raise and eyes didn't change.

_You do know that my aim with a pillow has gotten much better, right?_

There was a chuckle. "You would have to."

Beat. "Esme."

"Hmm?"

"I don't know how to do this."

She walked over to his chair and held a hand out. He looked at it, and then her, uncertainly. Hesitant in just looking at it, and even more in slipping his hand into hers. He moved slowly for how fast everything came and went for him, still in the full swing of having had human blood, but he was the same height as Carlisle and still enough.

She pulled him down and put her arms around his shoulders. Waiting until he finally stopped being stock still, until his head ducked just enough against her own shoulder, "You belong here."

He doesn't move for the longest time. Minutes. Before he finally set his arms around her frame, wondering how, how he'd missed so much, how any of this was even possible, how he could manage another five minutes, how they could be this way. Let it ramble in his head, let it ramble until all that was left was her words. Her words and Carlisle's.

And the smallest whisper, that she doesn't miss, that whole house can't. "Thank you."


	2. Chapter 2, Esme's Coda

_**1931; Esme's Coda**_

"I do have a question."

Esme had reappeared at the door to the room he was sitting in, and Edward glanced at her over the rise of the open piano. He'd been tuning a cord. It was immaculately undusty, but that didn't mean it had been seen to with the care of someone playing it or fine tuning it. And he wasn't quite to pulling out his journal with Esme in the house.

His eyebrows quirked, and he settled down on the bench, elbows resting on the cover over the keys.

She paused, her expression discerningly serious and her thoughts shifting over pristine, but older, memory. Then she focused hard on it, when she said quietly, uncertain but needing to say it and get some kind of answer. "You wanted to ask me something."

Edward watched himself blanch and look at the piano strings through her eyes, as the memory of the unwritten letter surfaced in her, and him, through her. He could have just looked at her, but not over that.

He'd-he thrown it-No. He hadn't. It'd never made the trashcan. He could remember crumpling it in his fingers and having to drop it. He couldn't make himself write the words. It had fallen on the floor and then Carlisle had come home with a question about the evening. A day before he had upended all their lives.

"If you-"

"I meant to throw it away." He overrides the wave of her conflicted thoughts and emotions.

"Except you didn't." _Except you left it on the floor for me to find_, her thoughts whispered. Indirectly.

The addressed, unwritten letter, like an extra slander against, not their, but, her inability to hold him, hold their family together. A phantom that said she might not have tried, heard, listened, been enough. A whisper of something she could not quantify or know. Only let go of. Until now.

Edward looked back at her, scarlet eyes and set shoulders, no longer the day's relative calm.

"It's already done-"

"But-"

"You already did it."

Esme blinked, confusion displacing the momentary rebellion.

"I already did what?"

Edward ran a hand up against his cheek. He dug his fingers into his hair right over his ear. Something with purchase, that was not clenching his hand around the piano bench Esme had made or the piano that Carlisle had kept.

The echoes of himself that were not his, and had not done anything but haunt them living while he'd been gone. That defined why they moved in a duality of speaking to him as though he'd never left, and startling just momentarily when they'd realize once again he really was there.

He can't look her in the eye when he says it.

He's nowhere near monstrous enough for it.

"Took care of him."

Esme stood there, in the doorway, taking in his answer. The myriad reactions and questions. The way they warred through each other and faded into one another. Until she was just standing there staring at his hair, half hidden face and the piano. She almost walked over to him more than once, but somehow. Somehow she does what he isn't expecting again;

"When are you going to play for him, again?"

Esme thoughts conceded that he must be at some point, even as it questioned that he must realize something of its importance. With his gifts and it still being there. Especially since he'd already toyed with it while she was home a few times. Wondered if he knew how much it would mean to Carlisle, in the ways where she was sure Carlisle wasn't even aware just how much it would mean. Except in the happening. That maybe it was the truth with both of them and it.

Except that wasn't the truth, was it?

It was that Edward understood how much it meant. How it being here, undisturbed by inches, and free of dust, all these years later, after all he'd done on leaving and all he'd become on abandoning, was like it being even bigger than him. And just being in the house, being in their thoughts, having them in his day, seemed so much bigger than he could handle in some moment.

He knew what it would mean to Carlisle. And even more what it would mean if he were playing for him. Here. Again. Even as his first two fingers shifted against the top in a distant arpeggio, Edward whispered

"I'm not ready."


End file.
